American Resources

Who decides which artists grab all the textbook and museum attention? Which artists have been understudied and why? Indeed, for every Picasso or Pollock, there is a lesser known artist whose contributions have been overlooked or underseen. This month, we're bringing you a Crash Course that aspires to open up an important conversation about creating a more inclusive art history.

Through Pinderhughes’ powerful camera lens, he makes clear that every human subject and every still life object has a story worth telling.

Just in time for the new year, we're bringing back one of our most popular, interactive virtual programs: Drinks with the Director: Why is THAT Famous?!?

Learn about Pinderhughes' decades-long career, his rise in the commercial and fine art photography worlds, and the inspirations behind the works in our upcoming original exhibition, Finding Meaning Within: The Photography of John Pinderhughes.

Learn about Pinderhughes' decades-long career, his rise in the commercial and fine art photography worlds, and the inspirations behind the works in our upcoming original exhibition, Finding Meaning Within: The Photography of John Pinderhughes.

Learn about Sacabo's decades-long career, the inspiration and mystery behind her works of art, and her ability to give voice to women of the past whose legacies still inspire us today.

A star of the New York art world, John Pinderhughes (b. 1946) has established himself over the past half-century as the ultimate observer and narrator of the communities all around him. This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College presents an original, extraordinary retrospective exhibition, years in the making, showcasing Pinderhughes’ broad reportorial eye and his ability to find meaning and value in everything — and every person — he photographs.

This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College is partnering with the Lakeland Symphony Orchestra (LSO) for a one-of-a-kind exhibition that promises to delight art and music lovers alike, transporting gallery visitors visually and aurally, engaging their eyes and their ears.

Josephine Sacabo’s art is both of our time and embedded deeply in a time past. She is an acclaimed, New Orleans-based contemporary photographer whose body of work seems infused with a powerful nostalgia for the non-digital photographic forms and techniques of photography’s nascent years as an artistic medium in the previous two centuries.

Have you ever wondered about what is going on in a painting? What that daydreaming figure is thinking about? What story the artist is trying to tell? Have you ever spun an elaborate tale or envisioned what that conversation might be between those two very angry-looking people across a room?

“Through A Brush With HerStory, my goal is to resurrect these artists from the shadows of history and the depths of dusty archives. Obstacles of the day — whether it was lack of training, family obligations, or the restraints placed by society upon their practice of painting — did not stand in the way of their craft. They were not the shining stars of art but were the quiet undercurrent that existed with little or no forum to rise above the premier art establishments of the era.”

In this Point of View Gallery Talk, Dr. H. Alexander Rich, Executive Director & Chief Curator of the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College, walks viewers through the process of examining a painting from the point of view of an art history student.

Faces in the Crowd is the second in a series of exhibitions showcasing the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College’s latest acquisitions of figurative American art .

Choreographer and Director of the dance program at Florida Southern College, Erin LaSala, along with students from Florida Southern College’s dance program provide a performance based gallery talk focusing on the artist Edgar Degas.

Read more on the exhibition, Double Vision: Photocentric Paintings by Richard Heipp.

Richard Heipp shares his perspective on his retrospective exhibition, Double Vision: Photocentric Paintings.

In this exhibition of selected works from the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College’s permanent collection, we will explore the concept of what it means to call something an American work of art. 

In most official art historical accounts of American art, it is not until the 1940s that American art found and identifiable home-grown style with the advent of Abstract Expressionism.